Spring 2003

INTRO TEXT When Olga Tsyganova entered a conference room in the US State Department to interview Secretary of State Colin Powell for TeenInk magazine, she didn’t clutch her note cards like the two other students in the room. The 19-year-old Franklin resident didn’t need reminders to ask tough questions. When Powell joined them–the interview was(...)

WHEN FALL RIVER officials pushed for state approval to raze the 100-unit Watuppa Heights public housing development last summer, they bolstered their case with a consulting firm’s study that said the city had an “excess” supply of affordable housing. Not long before, a study by the same firm, RKG Associates, informed the town of Plymouth that(...)

When incoming Gov. Mitt Romney named Doug Foy to be the state’s first chief of Commonwealth Development, one of two new “super cabinet” positions Romney created in December as part of his plan to restructure state government, more than a few heads turned. Not only had the venture capitalist who pledged to bring business sense(...)

Timothy P. Cahill’s second-floor suite in the State House is next to the Great Hall and across the corridor from the House Ways and Means Committee. The governor’s office is around the corner and up the stairs. At the State House, where location has the same significance it does in residential real estate, Room 227(...)

Carlos X. Garcia wants to be a radiologist. “At first I wanted to be a nurse, but you have to stick needles into people,” the 18-year-old explains as he presents a PowerPoint “autobiography” as part of a “presentation of learning” ceremony at Holyoke Community College one evening in February. “Then I was going to be(...)

HOPKINTON–On a sunny Saturday morning in March, nearly 110 Hopkinton residents sit down to solve a problem that their elected officials would prefer not to touch: the town’s budget crisis. Ensconced in the parish room of St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, they’ve worked three hours last evening, and will clock eight more before they’re(...)

From Mayzie to Mrs. Mallard, our official children’s tales are telling Last December, a sundered Massachusetts was united by a compromise worthy of the greatest statesmen. Robert McCloskey’s classic children’s book about how the Mallard family settled in the Public Gardens, Make Way for Ducklings, had been the odds-on favorite to become the “Official Children’s(...)

With revenue diminishing due to the stock market downturn and rising unemployment rates, the Bay State is experiencing the same fiscal squeeze being felt nationwide. As states across the country struggle with tax levies that no longer seem to be covering the spending obligations they took on during the 1990s boom years, the adequacy, fairness,(...)

The commonly used measures of state and local tax burden – revenues per capita and in proportion to personal income – are both apples-and-oranges comparisons, primarily because the revenues are not exclusively from personal taxes. But CommonWealth‘s attempt to improve upon these flawed methods by charting average tax burden as a percentage of median household(...)

Cape Cod Times blasts offshore wind farms

For there is a health along this golden shore,Climbing the dunes and hearing sea birds cry,Braving the winds and stormy ocean’s roarUnder an endless blue or cloudy sky;Then, freed at last, on soaring, flashing wingsin perfect tune the human spirit soars. This paean to the Cape Cod seascape, from Dennis poet Elizabeth Wysor, affixed atop(...)